This was a Christmas gift for me in 2015, so it’s one of the vanishingly few books for this blog that I bought new and that I’ve been the first owner of. Oddly, though, it’s in paperback, which makes it look a bit strange on my shelf of the rest of these books.

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One of my favourite things that the Dear Canada series has done is put together collections of Christmas-themed short stories that are addenda to the Dear Canada books themselves. I love it. And it’s Christmas time, so let’s have a look at them!

A Season for Miracles: Twelve Tales of Christmas, various authors, 2006.

To go through every short story would involve spoilers, so let me just give a brief recap of each short story and what book it’s connected to!

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I had so many mixed feelings about this book. I read it when it first came out, when I got a quarter of the way through and thought “What the hell,” and now I read the whole thing and thought “WHAT THE FUCK?” This book is for young people. Good Lord.

Shot at Dawn: World War I, Allan McBride, France, 1917, John Wilson, 2011.

For starters: I think it was a particularly brave decision by Scholastic for their very first book in a series that they would hoping be a popular spinoff to a popular series to be about a deserter being faced with execution. I mean, really. John Wilson is a great author who’s done a great job with it, so no qualms there (he also wrote Graves of Ice later in the series, which was also great), but this is pretty intense for what is ultimately a book targeted at YOUNG PEOPLE.

The structure of this book is also a bit different from some of the others—it starts out with a prologue where Allan is being held overnight in preparation for his execution the following morning, and telling his story to the officer guarding him will form the bulk of his story. I also don’t know for sure but I’d like to think that the choice of McBride is an allusion to The Green Fields of France, which if you haven’t listened to it (you should) refers to a young man by the name of Willie McBride. Anyway, that has nothing to do with anything, but I enjoyed it.

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I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I looked at this book and thought “When the hell did St. John’s have a great fire?” Not being a native of St. John’s, or Newfoundland, (or Canada if you want to get down to it,) I’m probably missing some things, but I can honestly say I learned something here.

One of the interesting things that I enjoyed about the acknowledgments in this book (which is not a sentence I write very often), is that she noted that Barbara Haworth-Attard (another Dear Canada author) informed her that Triffie, initially, “was not a likable character.” Knowing that gave the book a very different cast to me! This is a classic “fortunes reversed” story, and I have no complaints against that when it’s done well—and it is done well here. But I can see, in certain lights, how Triffie is absolutely not a likable character, certainly in the first portion of the book.

Here’s another thing—the only other book set in Newfoundland is set in the early part of settlement, and this one is set near the turn of the century in an urban setting, which is an interesting choice. Newfoundland is usually stereotyped as backwards and rural, but this is very modern and urban in tone, which is interesting and a nice choice.

Anyway, Triffie (which if you’re wondering is a nickname for Tryphena, and which my born-and-bred Newfoundland correspondent tells me is a very old-fashioned and familiar name there, which is a very neat little touch) is the daughter of a wealthy department store owner in St. John’s, where she lives with her parents, older sister Sarah, and younger brother Alfie. Alfie is sickly with a lung complaint (asthma), and he and Triffie are very close, which means they are usually in trouble somewhere in their magnificent house. Triffie is a bit spoiled thanks to her wealth and her generous father, and their home is full of beautiful and expensive things. Triffie’s foil is their youngest maid, Ruby, who is almost her age, but comes from around the bay and is working in St. John’s because her family needs the money. Not that knowing her story makes it any better—Triffie writes that when she gave Ruby an old dress, “I am not sure Ruby was properly grateful for this Act of Charity. I think those who are unfortunate enough to be poor should at least have the grace to show gratitude.”

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The only reason I’ve waited so long to review this book is because honestly? I hated it.

A Light in the Storm: The Civil War Diary of Amelia Martin, Fenwick Island, Delaware, 1860, Karen Hesse, 1999.

It’s an interesting story, I suppose. Delaware has got to be one of the most boring states in America, so its’s nice that they got thrown a bone of a DA book. Unfortunately, it’s boring and also irritating. This is a classic “I’m not like other girls!” book, which is one of the bugaboos that I harp on most frequently. For some reason I was absolutely obsessed with lighthouses as a kid, so I should have been all over this book, but even as a kid I found it vaguely irritating.

Amelia’s father is the lighthouse keeper on their island, so they live an isolated life from everyone else in town, and it’s abundantly obvious that her parents do not have a good marriage. Her mother is miserable on the island, while her father and Amelia both love it out there. And more importantly, her mother is ardently for slavery, while Amelia and her father are against it. So already the house is tense.

I think the entire reason I had no idea what was coming was because the back cover blurb on this book is terrible. Just terrible! Our fearless hero Sam has his plane shot down, and in his effort to get back to England he works with the French Resistance. It does not go well to say the absolute least.

The other thing that’s strange about this series is that some of them are more diary-style (numbered entries, text like “I don’t know what to write” or things like that) and some of them, like this one, are just straight first-person recounting that happen to have a date at the beginning of the chapter to orient the reader. Neither one is better, it’s just a little bit odd for me, the reader. (Or possibly it doesn’t bother normal people and it just bothers me, the reader reading these things for detail and comparing and contrasting them to other books in the same and sibling series.)